Part 25

But we do not need to look so far ahead as 1832 to see how the supporters of the principle of authority came into conflict with their own principle. Whatever men may support, their first requirement is liberty to speak. The divine thing about liberty is that even those who hate it need it and demand it. The _Conservateur_ began by ardently vindicating the liberty of the press, but was soon exceedingly inconvenienced by it. One party could not well deny the other's right to a liberty which it had claimed for itself; it could not well do it--but it did it. And the very same thing happened in the matter of parliamentary government, or, as it was then called, _the parliamentary prerogative_. It was the journalists and orators of the Catholic and royalist school who, immediately after the restoration of the monarchy, overthrew the first ministry, a ministry chosen by the king. The Catholics desired to get the helm of the state into their own hands. Thus it was the school of the principle of authority which first sanctioned the very opposite principles--liberty of the press in the widest sense of the word and the power of the parliamentary majority. It undermined the ground upon which authority rested.

Following the career of the haughty, passionate priest, Lamennais, we can trace the process stage by stage. The constitution (_la Charte_), between which and the monarchy there was an inseparable connection, ensured liberty of religion, on paper at least. But this liberty of religion incensed Lamennais, who knew that one religion alone was the true one. The foolish phrase was then in vogue, that the right to freedom of conscience is the right to be free from conscience. Lamennais and his followers maintained that a man ought to obey his conscience; and this, in their opinion, their opponents did not do. But they forgot that there is a duty which comes before that of obeying one's conscience, namely, the duty of enlightening it. If it be immoral to act against one's conscience, it is not less immoral to manufacture a conscience with the aid of false and arbitrary principles.

In the name of conscience and authority, then, Lamennais published a protest against the irreligion of the state, that is, against its recognition of no confession--what he called "political atheism." He started the cry: The laws of France are atheistical. He went farther. In a famous letter addressed to Bishop Frayssinous, and published in the newspaper _Le Drapeau blanc_, he declared that as the generation now to be brought up was a generation born in blood, hard by the scaffold of Louis XVI. and the altar of the goddess of reason, it could only be saved by Christ, only educated by Christianity. But all education in France was, he maintained, atheistic. "Am I exaggerating, Monseigneur, when I say that there are in France educational institutions, more or less closely connected with the University, where children are brought up in practical atheism and hatred of Christianity? In one of these horrible dens of vice and irreligion thirty of the pupils have been known to approach the table of the Lord, receive the sacred wafer, keep it, and commit a sacrilege which formerly would have been punished by law, namely, use it to seal the letters which they wrote to their parents. ... The influence of the University is producing an ungodly, depraved, rebellious generation."

These indiscreet revelations were very unwelcome to the party in power, who were much annoyed by such attacks on the constitution from a quarter where they had looked for warm support. When Lamennais found that he was treated with coldness and received reprimands instead of thanks, he went a step farther.

We have already seen that his doctrine led to the sacrificing of secular to ecclesiastical infallibility in cases of collision between them. But this was in reality equivalent to acknowledging that the heretical, free-thinking school was right in repudiating the quality of inviolability and irreversibility which the royalist writers ascribed to the monarchy by the grace of God. It moreover made the temporal power dependent on the spiritual, namely, on the Pope. All the bishops of France responded with a manifesto in which they declared the secular to be independent of the Papal power.

Lamennais, the champion of _authority_, now stood in the most strained relations with both the ecclesiastical and the temporal authorities.

His democratic period does not lie within the scope of the present work. We shall only note the germs of the later development which exist in his original theory of authority. This new theory of authority is fascinatingly unlike the good old hard and fast doctrine propounded by Bonald and De Maistre immediately after the Revolution. The reaction is now much more an affair of reason, consequently much less an affair of immovable principles. Every serious attempt to show the grounds upon which the principle of authority rests must inevitably deal the principle a death-blow; for authority does not rest upon grounds. Lamennais' doctrine, which at first sight seemed so favourable to autocracy, proved on closer inspection to be extremely democratic. The whole edifice rested upon the principle of the authority of the human race. But beneath this fundamental idea--the authority of the human race--another was perceptible; and what was this other but the idea so repugnant to the reactionaries, Rousseau's old idea--_the sovereignty of the people!_ Lamennais' readers did not observe this at once; he did not see it himself; but it lay dormant there, and one fine day it awoke and was recognised by all.

Lamennais desired to substitute theocracy for monarchy. But theocracy was not popular, was at any rate only popular when the word was interpreted in the sense of the old proverb: _vox populi, vox Dei_--when God's voice meant the voice of the people. The practical result of his doctrine was, then, merely the weakening of that secular authority which it asserted to be subject to the fiat of the reason of all; for the reason of all, which had at first been personified in the sovereign church, was very soon personified in the sovereign people. When Lamennais at last, in _Les Paroles d'un Croyant_, instigated to intellectual revolt, all the difference in his position was that he now desired theocracy for the sake of the people, instead of, as formerly, for the sake of their rulers.

The Revolution of July produced liberty of the press, and the first use Lamennais made of this was to publish a demand for the emancipation of education from state control and for the separation of the church from the state. He hoped by this means to get education altogether into the hands of the church, and thereby restore its old religious tendency. In the autumn of 1830 he started the famous newspaper _L'Avenir_, the watchword of which was the separation of church and state. Appeal to Rome was his answer to every attack; his newspaper was supposed to reflect the exact state of opinion there; but the Vatican remained obstinately silent. The fact of the matter was that it regarded Lamennais' liberal ideas with anything but favour, and had no inclination whatever to relinquish the state grant to the church. His opponents continuing to maintain that his opinions were incompatible with Catholic orthodoxy, Lamennais went to Rome in February 1831, to inquire of the Pope if it was (as he himself put it) a crime to fight for God, justice, and truth, and if it was desirable that he should continue his efforts. He was detained in Rome on one pretext or another until August 1832.

Presently the bull was published in which he, the opponent of indifference on the subject of religion, is declared guilty of religious indifferentism. In it we read: "From the impure source of this indifference springs also the erroneous and absurd, or, more correctly speaking, insane theory that liberty of conscience should be allowed and secured to all.... But, as St. Augustine said, _what worse death is there than liberty to go astray?_ For it stands to reason that when every restraint is removed that can keep men to the paths of truth, their nature, which inclines to evil, will plunge into the abyss.... Amongst these must be reckoned that abominable liberty which we can never sufficiently loathe and dread, the liberty of the press to publish any work whatsoever, a liberty which some dare to champion with such ardour".[4]

This was plain speaking. Lamennais made submission, and his newspaper stopped appearing. But the cup given him to drink was gall and wormwood, and only a drop was needed to make it overflow. From this time onwards he stood prepared to throw himself into the arms of the Revolution. And ere long he took the leap.

What most interests us, who are confining our attention to the first stage of Lamennais' psychological development, is to observe the manner in which his childish faith in authority is undermined as soon as he has the opportunity of seeing the holy thing close at hand. He writes from Rome in a private letter: "The Pope is pious, and has the best intentions; but he has little knowledge of the world, and is completely ignorant of the condition of the church and of society; he sits immovable in the darkness which closes in ever thicker round him, weeping and praying; his task, his mission is to prepare and hasten the final catastrophes which must precede the regeneration of society, and without which this regeneration would either be impossible or incomplete. Therefore God has given him into the hands of men who are as base as it is possible to be. Ambitious, greedy, and depraved, in their foolish frenzy they call on the Tatars to produce in Europe what they call _order_."

Is it not a remarkable coincidence that Lamennais, too, should end by finding a stumbling-block in the word which had determined the intellectual development of the whole generation? Victor Hugo in his endeavour to vindicate the principle of authority in matters of taste at last feels himself obliged to criticise and enlarge the idea of order; Lamennais in his battle for Catholicism is compelled to do the same. With what passionate grief does he describe in his letters the corruption which he finds prevailing amongst the props and pillars of _order_ in Rome!

"Catholicism was my life, because it is the life of humanity; my desire was to defend it, and to rescue it from the abyss into which it is sinking deeper every day. Nothing would have been easier. It did not suit the bishops that I should do it. There remained Rome. To Rome I went, and there I saw the most shameful sewer that has ever defiled the sight of man. The gigantic _cloaca_ of the Tarquinii would be too strait for so much filth. No god but self-interest reigns there; they would sell nations, sell the human race, sell the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity, for a piece of ground and a few piastres."

Such was the appearance at close quarters of the power whose most dauntless knight Lamennais had been. Was it any wonder that he turned round! Was it any wonder that he, like the priests of the ancient Saxons to whom Renan has compared him, cut down with a well-directed blow of his axe the divinity to whose altar he had summoned the reluctant world!

But even more remarkable than this clearsightedness in a single matter are the gleams of profounder general insight which we now find in Lamennais' letters. Hitherto he had sought absolute truth, and had looked to authority to ensure this. Now he suddenly arrives at the idea of relativity, the idea which most thoroughly and utterly demolishes the principle of authority.

"The older I grow the more it astonishes me to see how all the beliefs which are deepest rooted in us depend upon the age in which we live, the society into which we have been born, and a thousand other equally accidental circumstances. Only think what our beliefs would be if we had come into the world ten centuries earlier, or had been born in this century at Teheran, at Benares, or on the Island of Otaheite!"

There is more philosophy in these two sentences, which forestall Taine's theory of the influence of surroundings, than in all the volumes of Lamennais' famous chief work.[5]

[1]

The following verses date from his earliest youth:

On a souvent vu des maris, Jaloux d'une épouse légère; On en a vu même à Paris, Mais ce n'est pas le tien, ma chère.

On a vu des amants transis, Ainsi qu'une faveur bien chère, Implorer un simple souris, Mais ce n'est pas le tien, ma chère.

[2] _Reden über die Religion_. Fifth edition, pp. 50, 54, 56.

[3] _Du progrès de la révolution et de la guerre contre l'église_.

[4] Atque ex hoc putidissimo _indifferentismi_ fonte absurda illa fluit ac erronea sententia, seu potius deliramentum, asserendam esse ac vindicandam cuilibet _libertatem conscientiæ_.... _At quæ pejor mors animæ quam libertas erroris?_ inquiebat Augustinus. Freno quippe omni adempto, quo homines contineantur in semitis veritatis, proruit jam in præceps ipsorum natura ad malum inclinata.... Huc spectat deterrima illa ac nunquam satis execranda et detestabilis libertas artis librariæ ad scripta quælibet edenda in vulgus, quam tanto convicio audent nonnulli efflagitare ac promovere.

[5] Lamennais, _Essai sur l'indifférence; Progrès de la révolution et de la guerre contre l'église; Correspondance par M. Forgues; Œuvres inédits par M. Blaize_; Schleiermacher, _Reden über die Religion_; Renan, _Essais de morale et de critique_; Schérer, _Mélanges de critique religieuse_.

XIII

CULMINATION AND COLLAPSE OF THE REACTION

We have been carried on a few years too far by following Lamennais to the period of his conversion to democracy. At the time of the completion of his book on indifference in the matter of religion, that is in 1823, he, like all the other adherents of the principle of theocracy, still aimed at strengthening the authority of the monarch by means of the authority of the church.

Presently the particular monarch in question dies, and Charles X. ascends the throne. He ascends it with all possible pomp and ceremonial. He is taken to Reims to be anointed. The ceremony was performed on the 20th of May 1825, and it seemed as if the old royalist and religious superstitions had risen from their graves for the occasion. One of the oldest of these was the belief that crowned heads possessed the power of curing scrofula. This power had been regarded as absolutely indisputable. A lady of Valenciennes, who had been touched by Louis XV., and who afterwards, in the hope of getting into favour, sent in a medical certificate that she was entirely cured of scrofula, received the answer: "The privileges which the Kings of France enjoy in the matter of the healing of scrofula have been attested by such conclusive proofs that they require no further confirmation."

This was under Louis XV. Under Charles X. people showed themselves no less orthodox. We remember that at the time of the Revolution the ampulla containing the sacred oil was shivered into fragments. In the eyes of pious Catholics this was sacrilege of the deepest dye. Gregory of Tours, the earliest chronicler who tells of the baptism of Clovis, has evidently no idea that this little fig-shaped vial of heavenly anointing oil was used on the occasion. But some centuries later various traditions on the subject were committed to writing, some of them telling that the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove, others that an angel, had deposited it in the cathedral of Reims; and these traditions, which had survived as popular beliefs, were now freshened up again. The man who had been priest at the church of St. Remi at Reims in 1793, and from whom the sacred ampulla had been taken by force, came forward and declared that before giving it up he had extracted most of the congealed oil which it contained; and this he now produced.[1] Another of the faithful asserted that at the time the sacrilege was committed he had collected some fragments of the ampulla, which he had kept until now. The priest and the church officials recognised these fragments as genuine.

So Charles X. was able to rejoice his subjects with the intelligence that he was to be anointed with the sacred oil of Clovis. The fragments of the old ampulla were introduced into a new one, covered with gold and precious stones, and the precious drops were diluted with others. Particulars of the anointment have already been given in connection with the coronation of Napoleon. At ten o'clock on the morning of the following day, the King mounted a beautiful white horse and rode in the midst of a brilliant retinue, and attended by a troop of hussars, to the hospital of St. Mark. There the chief physician to the royal household awaited him at the head of a band of 121 persons afflicted with scrofula. The King, after offering a short prayer in the hospital chapel, set boldly to his task of curing them. The famous surgeon Dupuytren was not ashamed to hold the heads of some of the patients during the comedy.

Lamartine celebrated the anointment of Charles X. in a cycle of poems (_Chant du sacre_) and Victor Hugo in an enthusiastic ode. But on the occasion of the same memorable event there was also written a little song which led to its author's prosecution and punishment. The song was called _Sacre de Charles le Simple_, and the name of its writer was Béranger.

The tone of Victor Hugo's ode, _Le Sacre de Charles X_, was, as the following verse shows, orthodox, Biblical, and royalist:

Mais trompant des vautours la fureur criminelle, Dieu garda sa colombe au lys abandonné. Elle va sur un Roi poser encor son aile: Ce bonheur à Charles est donné! Charles sera sacré suivant l'ancien usage, Comme Salomon, le Roi sage, Qui goûta les célestes mets, Quand Sadoch et Nathan d'un baume l'arrosèrent, Et, s'approchant de lui, sur le front le baisèrent, En disant: "Qu'il vive à jamais!"

The tone of Béranger's poem was disrespectful in the extreme. He apostrophises the sparrows, which, according to an old custom, had been driven into the church to fly about there, and charges them to guard their liberty better than human beings have guarded theirs:

Français, que Reims a réunis, Criez: Montjoie et Saint-Denis! On a refait la sainte ampoule, Et, comme au temps de nos aïeux, Des passereaux lâchés en foule Dans l'église volent joyeux. D'un joug brisé ces vains présages Font sourir sa majesté. Le peuple s'écrie: Oiseaux, plus que nous soyez sages, Gardez bien, gardez bien votre liberté!

O oiseaux, ce roi miraculeux Va guérir tous les scrofuleux. Fuyez, vous qui de son cortège Dissipez seuls l'ennui mortel; Vous pourriez faire un sacrilége En voltigeant sur cet autel. Des bourreaux sont les sentinelles Que pose ici la piété. Le peuple s'écrie: Oiseaux, nous envions vos ailes. Gardez bien, gardez bien votre liberté! Gardez bien votre liberté!

With the exception of Delavigne, who is a direct descendant of the eighteenth century writers, and who in his _Méseniennes_ shows himself to have been an equally ardent revolutionist and patriot, Pierre de Béranger was the only poet who had kept aloof from the dominant group of thinkers and talented writers. Born in 1780, he was nine at the time of the storming of the Bastille, which event left as ineffaceable an impression on his mind as did those writings of Voltaire which he read in his childhood. The following anecdote will serve to show how early he arrived at definite conclusions on religious matters. One day when he was only thirteen years old he was standing laughing scornfully at his aunt, who was sprinkling the room with holy water during a dreadful thunderstorm, when a flash of lightning came into the room, passing so close to him that he fell to the ground unconscious. He was so long in recovering that it was feared he was dead. The first thing he did when he opened his eyes was to call triumphantly to his kind, pious aunt: "Well, was your holy water of any use?" The anecdote has an air of truth, and it is told in depreciation of him by orthodox writers. It was in this same spirit that he now attacked the Bourbons, and their holy water was of no use to them.

At the very time when they were making themselves ridiculous there occurred a remarkable phenomenon. A poetic halo developed round the once hated name of Napoleon. He was transformed from a historical into a mythical figure; during his own life-time he became a legendary hero. The compulsory inactivity which suddenly followed on a display of energy that had kept all Europe in constant agitation, powerfully affected the popular imagination. There was in reality no element of greatness in Napoleon's compulsory second abdication, and his plan of placing himself under the protection of England was simply a rash one. But the ignoble manner in which the English treated him added to his fame. The far-off, lonely island in the middle of the great ocean became, as it were, a pedestal for the heroic figure. The real Bonaparte was transformed into an ideal Napoleon. History made him over to poetry and legend.

Even his former enemies could not restrain an expression of admiration for the man in whose direction all eyes turned. Chateaubriand gave utterance to the famous saying, "that Napoleon's grey coat and hat upon a stick, planted on the coast at Brest, would be enough to make all Europe take up arms."

Béranger wrote the soulful poem _Les souvenirs du peuple_, which perhaps gives us the simplest and most beautiful picture of the legendary hero, but also that which has least resemblance to the real man, for it makes him out to be as kindly as he is great. It is the poem which begins:

On parlera de sa gloire Sous le chaume bien long-temps: L'humble toit, dans cinquante ans, Ne connaîtra plus d'autre histoire.

The reminiscences of the Emperor are put into the mouth of the old grandmother, who at different periods of her life has seen him--first as the victorious general, then as the happy father on his way to Notre Dame, then as the defender of France against the allied armies. A good specimen verse is:

Mes enfants, dans ce village, Suivi de rois, il passa. Voilà bien long-temps de ça: Je venais d'entrer en ménage. À pied grimpant le coteau Où pour voir je m'étais mise Il avait petit chapeau Et redingote grise. Près de lui je me troublai! Il me dit: Bon jour, ma chère, Bon jour, ma chère. Il vous a parlé, grand'mère, Il vous a parlé!

The young men who not long ago had been thankful to break their ranks and escape from the tyranny of military discipline, now began to look back with longing to the heroic days of the Consulate and the Empire. They had been dreaming, writes De Musset, of the ice of Russia and the sun of the Pyramids, and the world of the day seemed an empty, colourless world. "The King of France sat upon his throne, and some held out their hats for him to throw an alms into them, and others held out crucifixes, which he kissed. And when boys talked of glory, the answer was: 'Become priests!' and when they talked of honour, the answer was: 'Become priests!' and when they talked of hope, of love, of energy and life, it was still: 'Become priests!'"[2]